Sunday, 24 May 2015

In Alan Moore's and Dave Gibbon's Watchmen (London, 1987), the news vendor misremembers two superhero names as "SUPER-MAN, FLASH-MAN..." (Chapter III, p. 25, panel 3). Of course, the names were really Superman and The Flash. However, "Spider-man" is always written with a hyphen to prevent confusion with Superman. Further, there is a literary character called "Flashman."

The journalist, Doug Roth, refers to Adrian Veidt/Ozymandias as "Ozyman...whoops. Uh-huh. We don't call him that anymore, do we? The mask is gone..." ("AFTER THE MASQUERADE: Superstyle and the art of humanoid watching." (p. 8) IN Watchmen.)

By interrupting "Ozymandias," Moore generates another "...man" name, implying an origin in Oz or Australia.

Saturday, 23 May 2015

(Far out. One image gives us the cover of my edition of Watchmen and the Awesome Mage himself.)

I am rereading Alan Moore's Watchmen so I need an angle to discuss it on the Poul Anderson Appreciation blog. Easy. It is all in the alternative histories.

Poul Anderson gives us alternative histories in which:

the Carolingian myths were true;
William Shakespeare was not the Great Dramatist but the Great Historian;
technology was based not on science but on magic.

And Alan Moore gives us alternative histories in which:

when
superhero comics inspired real life superheroes, comic books turned
instead to pirates and, after the New York incident, to horror;
Superman
and Captain Marvel were comic book characters but Mick Anglo's
Marvelman was a parareality program and Moore's revived Marvelman was
the real thing.

Monday, 18 May 2015

Last night, for a change from Latin verse or American English prose, I reread parts of the graphic work, The Ultimates by
Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch, a superior version of the Marvel Comics
superhero team, the Avengers. Of course, I found a parallel with Poul
Anderson: the Ultimates include Thor.

However, this is a
New Age Thor who defends anti-war demonstrators against the police and
calls the US a new Roman Empire! The reference to the Roman Empire is a second parallel. But is the Ultimates Thor inauthentic? He is certainly un-Eddaic but, as I pointed out here, our gods have grown up with us. Poul Anderson, of course, shows us this process in "Star of the Sea."

Saturday, 2 May 2015

(This
is an indulgent image. It came up on a google search for "The Boat of a
Million Years." It shows the Barge and the Solar System and I recognize
it as a page from a comic book written by Alan Moore.)

Poul Anderson, The Boat Of A Million Years (London, 1991).

Pytheas
will take fifteen years to reach its destination, a planet in Pegasus.
About fifteen hundred light years in the same direction is the nearest
of the radiation sources that might be a high-energy civilization.

The Sun is little more than the brightest star when Pytheas
is near Jupiter. Anderson must describe stars seen from space yet
again. This time, the Milky Way is "...like a river of frost and light."
(p. 499)

The Survivors have paired off:

Hanno and Svoboda;
Wanderer and Flora;
Patulcius and Aliyat;
Tu Shan and Yukiko.

Patulcius and Aliyat are a surprise but we remember that Patulcius did marry occasionally down the millennia.

Friday, 1 May 2015

How
would you talk with someone who you knew was three millennia old? His
experience would have an entire dimension that was unknown to you, like
speaking with someone who had returned from another planet. The
fictional CS Lewis wonders where he stands with his friend Ransom when
the latter has returned from Malacandra/Mars.

Giannotti,
who knows Hanno's age, asks him whether he picked up the habit of
smoking from Tutankhamen but Hanno replies, "'Before my time...'" (p.
378). Natalia, who does not know his age, accuses him of having
"'...Neanderthal politics...'" (p. 410)! He could have quipped, "Before
my time...," but she would have neither understood nor appreciated that.
She also accuses him of "'Plagiarizing Heinlein...'" (p. 385). Thus,
Anderson acknowledges his debt to Heinlein.

Natalia
knows that Hanno is concealing everything about himself, his real life
and work, from her. This is destroying their relationship even before he
meets an immortal woman, Svoboda. This reminded me of something. In the
Smallville TV series, Lana Lang and Lex Luthor know and sense
that Clark Kent is concealing something important about himself from
them. They know that there is a mystery but do not know what it is. The
deception implicit from the beginning in Superman's secret identity
generates a tragedy of Greek proportions. Clark should have confided in
four close friends from the beginning. They would have kept the secret
and helped him. Instead, Luthor becomes a mortal enemy. Hanno, however,
has impeccable reasons to remain silent.

"'Since the Goetz case, the liberals have been out for blood.'" (p. 435)

This morning, I read this reference to Goetz in Boat. Last night, I reread Tom Veitch's and Bryan Talbot's graphic series, The Nazz,
which is about super powers, super-heroism and vigilantism and refers
to Goetz, although I now cannot find the reference flicking back through
it.

I also heard Goetz mentioned in a discussion of Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns
which presents the Batman as a violent vigilante wanted by the police
for crimes including child endangerment - he is said to be sheltering
behind a masked child in a red and yellow costume - and, when the
Joker's dead body is found, murder.

I feel that Hanno's
"'...the liberals have been out for blood...'" is a rather inflammatory
way of discussing urban violence! - but I know that opinions are
divided and polarized on such issues. Hanno and his fellow immortals are
just passing through the twentieth century and very soon will have left
such conflicts far behind them.

(Four posts before
10.30 this morning: a good start to May. A Bank Holiday weekend with
good weather stretches invitingly ahead of us.)